1. Technical Field
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to network management systems and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for a current failure occurring in a datacenter of the network.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data is the underlying resource on which all computing processes are based. With the recent explosive growth in demand on data storage systems, different storage networking applications or configurations like Network Attached Storage (NAS) or Storage Area Network (SAN) have come into existence. Today's complex storage networks require sophisticated software applications to plan, discover, configure and monitor many components and technologies that make up the storage network infrastructure. Once storage networks, for example, Storage Area Networks (SANs) become established, the availability of storage resources is an essential requirement.
Computers are often used to store valuable data as society has been increasingly software driven in recent years. Because of calamity or other failures within any computer system, valuable data may be lost. Therefore, it is extremely important that such data be safely stored and retrievable. Under such a circumstance, it is essential to provide a storage system or a data redundancy and establishes proper means for storage system/data recovery.
But in many data processing systems (e.g., a file server for storage area network and the like), failures occur very often. Such failures may be addressed by a system administrator. The duties of the system administrator include securing the data processing system from intrusions and maintaining the performance and stability of resources for a plurality of client computers in order to ensure productivity.
When a failure occurs, the system administrator may determine a root cause of the failure and then follows a procedure for fixing or mitigating the failure. The procedure includes a series of manual actions executed by the system administrator. After the failure is fixed or mitigated, the system administrator should make substantially the same determinations if the failure recurs. The system administrator may not remember the earlier performed actions and thus wastes a significant amount of time in fixing or mitigating the same failure. Furthermore, a different system administrator may not know the procedure used earlier by the system administrator and will have to spend a significant amount of time figuring out a substantially similar or even exactly the same procedure.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for managing failures in the datacenter where information for mitigating a current failure is used to support the system administrator in a time and cost-efficient manner.